Meanwhile, co-owner Andrew Wong grew up in a restaurant family and his partner, Andrew Chiu (we’re calling these dudes AndrewAndrew), has deep family connections and lived for six years in Beijing. Heaping a little hubris onto the hotpot, Chiu tells the blog, “Our food is going to be totally authentic and comparable to, if not better than the best of SGV has to offer.”

Big words. But since we barely know Schezuan from Shineola, we asked L.A.’s resident expert in all things SGV, SinoSoul’s Tony Chen, to take a break from documenting L.A.-area Besha-bashing to offer his opinion on how a Downtown Chinese gastropub might fit into the city’s pigu-kicking, still relatively unappreciated Chinese dining scene.

Though he wishes “they would’ve went with the positive slant, instead of trying to better SGV,” Chen offers Peking Tavern his best wishes and says, “This may be J. Gold’s wet dream of a restaurant: cool enough for Westside readers to care, and a menu chock full of hand-pulled noodles. If they succeed, they’ll be pioneers, enabling the likes of Dip’s Grill and Liang’s to migrate westward. If they fail, well, we’ll know L.A. is still full of narrow-minded hipster eaters.”

We’ll find out the final results when Peking Tavern opens, currently anticipated before the end of 2012 on Spring Street.